RC9au – The End

RailsCamp9 formed what was about 72 of the fastest hours of my life. I’ve made it back across the border from New South Wales into Queensland, I can hear the fairly constant roar of planes taking off from where I am. Though there’s a real chance I could be stuck here due to an ash cloud from a volcano. The final night was one of the best, no doubt about that, read on to find out!

Because RailsCamp goes for several days everyone gets a chance to present what they’ve been hacking away at over the course. It was a great way to for people to learn off each other and a grand display of the amount of knowledge contained in that one room.

It was almost impossible to take photos with my camera, but here’s a screenshot of Glove, browser based, multiplayer and powered by node.js.

Glove

The objective was to avoid death by moving around the map and attacking the enemies. It triggered a lot of memories of the original Zelda game.

Memories

It’s pretty astounding what a few people can achieve with an idea and a weekend.

There were so many things built, but what was perhaps most interesting, is that most of what people had made, was not made in Ruby. Everyone was very interested in learning other languages, which is probably what keeps them so sharp.

RailsCamp was fantastic. I would love to have the opportunity to go to another. As someone who knows very little about Ruby on Rails, the idea of going to a three day even about that was definitely daunting. However I found the most easy to approach, friendly people I’ve arguably ever come across. If you’re interested in Ruby/Rails or perhaps just programming in general you shouldn’t miss it if you have the chance to go.

Naturally, this is where the coverage of RailsCamp9 AU draws to an end. I still have some more interviews to transcribe including one with Dan Cheail, who used to run RubySource and also contributes, as well as David Jones, one of the masterminds behind RefineryCMS, so you can look forward to reading those very soon.

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